Imagine you’re a knight living in 16th century the British Isles. Lots of ale and mead, shiny armor and sword, and a cushy noble status that provides you with great respect from all those around you. Sounds pretty good, right? Well aside from the fact that you would be drinking alcohol out of necessity for lack of clean drinking water, that status was earned through life-long training followed by long campaigns filled with periods of hunger and exhaustion. That armor is starting to look a little heavy, isn’t it? But all that aside, one of the most important things you need to understand about being a knight is what chivalry means in medieval society. And no, it’s not just jousting and helping young maidens across large puddles to avoid getting their skirts wet. Chivalry wasn’t just a thing you acted out, it was a principle you had to immerse yourself in, an ideal you had to gain through experiences, through trials, and tribulations. This idea of chivalry is what allows us to understand the genre of medieval romances.
One such romance is The Squire of Low Degree. With this piece, as with many others of the era, it might be easy for modern readers to fall into the trap of analyzing the protagonist with on our modern notions of what chivalry was in medieval England, which if we are being honest are mostly informed by Hollywood movies, bedtime stories, and the like. The idea of chivalry was necessary in a time where instability and death ran rampant. It held people to a greater standard, especially with regard to the power (both physically and societally) that these men held. In Phillip M. Taylor’s book, Munitions of the Mind, he quotes historian Johan Huizinga in saying that chivalry was “‘the strongest of all the ethical conceptions which dominated the mind and heart’ of late medieval man”(Taylor, 67). In short, chivalry was something that these knights developed over a lifetime of experiences. This is possibly why medieval romances focus so heavily on the epic-style narrative which sees the main character going through unexpected trials which shape his character and evolve him into the hero that deserves a happy ending.
While The Squire of Low Degree is shorter than many epic-style poems of the time and therefore does not have the classic romantic structure wherein the plot contains “side-quests” with multiple villains, which allow the protagonist to strengthen their moral principles, in addition to the main quest aka the goal of the knight in shining armor to slay the dragon and marry the princess if you will. However, the squire as well as the princess in the story must go through a similarly long journey in order to find their happily ever after. They must both endure time apart (seven years to be precise) and dangerous betrayals. The squire is betrayed multiple times by the steward who tries to spoil his romance with the princess by reporting it to the king and again when he physically attacks him. The princess is betrayed by her father in a sense as he makes her believe that the squire is dead for those seven years. Honestly, if I had been mourning over the wrong dead body and keeping it in my bedroom for seven years and my own father never told me, I might be shocked enough to faint, too! All in all, we see from this poem and from others of its kind, that chivalry was a party of medieval life that allowed society to function in a time of plagues and starvation.
Citations:
Philip M. Taylor. “The Chivalric Code.” Munitions of the Mind, Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 67–72.
As a big fan of fantasy literature and how chivalry and its ideals inspired many of my favorite works, seeing this dissection of chivalry was interesting! I loved thinking about it from a historical perspective as to what role it would play in society, and how epic poems following these ideal knight-type characters would only serve to amplify its role in society. I have to wonder, what would be the modern equivalent of chivalry today? I feel like there’s still some kind of chivalristic ideal that still pervades literature today, but I can’t quite place it as it isn’t exactly analogous to the historical view of chivalry you discuss here.
I really enjoyed how you offered a new light into how we frame our thinking about chivalry. I also loved how you incorporated humor in this blog post. You mention a bit how chivalry is hard to be portrayed in a short epic like The Squire of Low Degree. I’m really curious to see the specifics of how chivalry does appear in this work in smaller ways. It might be interesting to do a close reading comparison to a longer epic poem to see chivalry played out a bit more between the two.
Meaghan, I really enjoyed reading this post! Your opening and use of humor is so engaging and made me check the stereotypical and romanticized version of a knight in shining armor in my head. Your context is useful in understanding what knighthood actually looked like and its hardships, and really made me understand chivalry as a serious moral code that took a lifetime to achieve. It also was interesting to hear the social context of knights and chivalry kind of metaphorically and literally representing hope and high standards during these dark ages. There’s so much more to the knight’s tale!!
Meaghan, this blog post was so insightful and interesting to read! As you mentioned, chivalry is depicted as more of example of how one should behave, but to see the implications that it had on society and order in the medieval era taught me a lot of how chivalry functions in medieval romances. Going on the same point, the assertion you made about medieval romances depicting unusually long journeys as a result of the long-term implications that chivalry has on an individual, particularly a knight, was something that I had not thought of before, and I would like to think more about this idea in relation to other medieval texts.